‘A Monument for the Invisible’ by Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard

Traditionally we consider staging, whether in film or theatre, as a spatial and temporal marker whose primary function is to act as the background for the progression of a narration and the development of characters. But more often the locations, the set design, the overall fictional space or architecture of a film actually make up a persona or character in itself. It can even take the leading role. Think of the park in Antonioni’s Blowup, Xanadu in Citizen Kane or even better: the suburbs in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the space ship in A Space Odyssey, Hotel Overview in The Shining. In these movies space and location is staging people, not the other way around. In A Space Odyssey it is for instance not the astronauts who are travelling to Jupiter with the space ship; it is a space craft that is travelling with the astronauts. The oversimplified point could be that our so-called constructed environments, whether it’s a space shuttle or a perfect urban plan that once should guarantee us the ultimate control over nature has ended up determining us instead.

Location

In her urban film project “A Monument for the Invisible” Anu Pennanen is investigating to what degree our collectively created surroundings are staging and narrating us and reversely. The central part of her project is a semi-fictional film depicting two new commercial zones in Helsinki , built in the typical corporate style of steel and glass. Johanna, the main character, is acting both as herself and as a fictional person. Through her Helsinki is thus represented and investigated both as an actual geography and as a fictional location. Johanna, both the fictional and real, is blind. But her blindness is not represented as a handicap but as a natural form of resistance towards the modern cityscape. Johanna is an explorer and analyst of the urban surroundings, not a victim. Normally we think that we’re grounded in space (and time) through vision and that vision allows us freely to master our movements in space. But Johanna shows us that the sighted is actually more controlled by the environment than the blind. Sighted persons are simply moving in the directions that they’re visually told to while the blind has to find his or her own way around step by step and thus has a very grounded and concrete experience of the cityscape. The practice of the blind city dweller’s everyday life is by definition diversionary (referring to de Certeau’s notion of “Le Perruque”) since he or she doesn’t perceive the architecture in the way it was intended. Modern architecture has as we know been developed and reflected on primarily as an abstracted visual phenomenon. Light is apparently the most important building material we have and architectural space is often understood relative to how it conducts our sight than our bodies, being described from its visual qualities such as the relation among transparency, opacity and reflection (glass, stone, steel). Besides our public space is loaded with visual information: lights, signs, billboards, screens directing or protecting us within existing space or seducing us to investigate new imaginary space. Particularly for the sighted person the body is not a private zone, but can be seen as public spaces accessible for different political, social, commercial or aesthetic interests through the eyes.

Collective monument

This is what the blind Johanna could make us see. Without romanticizing Pennanen points out that vision might integrate, control and harmonize the various components necessary to move in a direction toward a specific goal , physical or imaginary, but at the same time vision makes us blind towards the concrete spatial and visual structures we’re moving within and are directed by. But even though our surroundings might stage us in a certain fashion Pennanen wouldn’t claim that we’re being suppressed by them. Our built environments do not represent any identifiable central power like the historical monument. We’re not being watched by God, the King or Stalin as the traditional statue on the square indicated in order to control our behaviour. Collective power structures are instead being distributed and internalized in each of us through the (differentiated) mental-sensory experience of spatial structures, through urban planning and architecture.

Thus the city is fundamentally an invisible phenomenon for the sighted as well as for the blind. The city is not architecture so to say. Buildings are visual markers, even modern collective monuments of all the invisible structures that create and define our city spaces being legal formation of property lines, economic arrangements, social relations and political conditions and visions. The premise of modern architecture has traditionally been to create collective projection spaces for social, political or economic visions and thus work like a monumental social and societal cinema. The new architectural zones, Johanna is exploring with her fencing stick, isn’t just representing a physical expansion of the urban geography. It is in itself a fiction, a location, yes, a monument, not for history to be remembered but for futures to be.

Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard is a freelance writer, critic and lecturer at the University of Copenhagen.